Recently while I was upgrading a hard drive on one of my servers, I found a webcam that I purchased around 18 months ago. It was one of those cheap webcams that I bought,installed for a test then I just promptly forgot about. Somehow I must have stored it on the top of the server case (under a desk) and then I somehow must have pushed it to the back of the case and guess what happened next? It fell off to the back of the server.

Not remembering what I had done with the camera box and the driver disc, I tried to search for a driver online. Since there was hardly any marking on the camera itself, except the word “kinstone” on the front of the clip that forms the base of the camera. Well, lo and behold, I found a website called kinstone.net. I quickly found the download section and before I knew it I had downloaded a driver to my desktop.

After decompressing the file, I found a folder called kinstone_xxx_xxx on my desktop. I opened the folder and found a sub folder called “setup”. After I double-clicked the installer file (setup.exe) it installed all the files and created shortcuts. However, using this method, the camera was not recognised and therefore was not working. I attempted to install the driver through the “found new hardware” wizard and it was still no go.

When I tried to find the instaleld files in “Program Files” directory I found a folder called “vimicro” which the installer had created. So when multiple attempts to get windows to install the driver for the camera failed, I put vimicro into Google and then voila! I found out that vimicro was a company that made the chipset for the kinstone webcams. So I downloaded a driver from their website and there was even a tool which will tell you which driver to download (can identify the chipset of the camera). The driver downloaded from vimicro works flawlessly.

So if you have a Kinstone USB webcam it might be best to head straight to the vimicro website.